“I understand,” Lana said. “Is there anything else you can tell—”
She was silenced by the abrupt appearance on-screen of the sub’s interior. Now she saw why: it had surfaced and was also visible on the split screen. The hackers had taken control of the ship’s cameras in the control and attack centers. Sailors were staggering, clutching their throats, and falling to the floor.
“Jesus Christ,” Deming said, jumping out of his chair.
“What’s going on?” Lana said, staring in horror as sailors appeared to be dying right before her eyes, just seconds after the video had come alive. They were staggering, vomiting, gasping for breath, and falling to the floor. Some were now going into convulsions.
“Poison,” Deming said, still standing. “They’re poisoned.”
“Good God,” Holmes replied. “Isn’t there emergency oxygen?”
“Of course,” Deming said sharply. “But this is happening so fast nobody has a chance to grab it, and it might not do them any good anyway because oxygen isn’t always an antidote for poison.”
Sailors kept dropping to the sub floor. All appeared to be in their death throes. It was the most ghastly sight Lana had ever seen.
And then the video ended as the sub dived back down, as if to suggest the men and women were headed to a watery grave, leaving a shadow of terror on the faces of Admiral Deming and Bob Holmes.
If she could have seen herself then, Lana would have noticed a familiar look on her own face: fear mingled with fierceness. Her jaw was tight, shiny black hair pulled behind her ears, clear blue eyes staring nakedly at the blank screen. And if she’d lowered her gaze a mite more, she would have seen her fingers flying across the keyboard, trying desperately to find her way into the deeply veiled and violent world of digital terrorism.
CHAPTER 2
You could miss Starbucks if you blinked. It was so unlike Russian businesses, which screamed for attention in the post-Soviet capitalist apocalypse. Oleg Dernov had just walked past a hotel — granted, a most esteemed establishment, one his father naturally favored — with a Rolls Royce dealership in the lobby! What, you can order Phantom with room service now?
For so long Oleg had had such a weakness for those cars. So beauteous. And he would own one soon, maybe even the hotel and the block it sat upon. Not a pipe dream. Very serious.
So’s this, he thought, swinging open the door to a more modest Moscow establishment, the Starbucks he’d been looking for. It spoke of wealth, too, but maybe not so loudly as a Rolls Royce Phantom. Though his English-speaking friends could no more read the Starbucks sign than the future, they recognized the distinctive green lettering — the color of the new one-thousand-ruble note. No wonder Muscovites loved Starbucks so much, a little bit of heaven with every sip.
For Oleg, heaven also had a name: Galina Bortnik. Where was she? The Starbucks was not so crowded, but Galina was so tiny.
Ah, there she was, her nose buried in a MacBook. Good girl. Always working. Fast as fire. But not online. No hacker would ever risk having their computer’s Mac address captured on a public network.
So adorable in her swishy pale-blue pleated dress that fell not even halfway down her milky thighs. Such a munchkin. Five feet — maybe. Black hair cut by his own stylist, so it looked chic, as in you’d never guess Galina Bortnik was a single mom, stuck with a deadbeat dad, or a former nanny or dropout from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Most of all, do you know what you would never guess? She is greatest hacker in all of Russian Federation. Maybe greatest in world.
Except for me.
He rushed to her table. Muah, a kiss for the right cheek. Muah, a kiss for the left cheek. Muah, a kiss for her cushiony lips. She smelled like lavender. And her cheeks so red. A shy girl, a sexy girl, a girl who blushes from such a modest greeting. How good is that?
She already had taken her first sip of her espresso con panna, three shots with real whipped cream. Nothing light for her. And she had the appealing, slightly plump pulchritude of a ripe apricot, and the complexion of — what did the Brits and Americans call it? — “peaches and cream.” That’s it. She was the whole fruit basket. She didn’t skimp on fats, but good fats. And she was slightly plump, but good plump.
True, Oleg’s plutocratic father had warned him that girls like Galina turned to lard quickly, with everything “sagging and dragging” by the time they were thirty-five, but right now Galina Bortnik was twenty-six years old with full bouncy breasts and thighs so smooth and wonderfully soft when she wrapped them around his back and rocked him in the warm bath of pleasure he didn’t care if she put on ten kilograms a year for ten years. They would be like candy to him. Besides, his father was a rich asshole, married six times. Still waiting for his Galina.
Was this love?
Not so much for Oleg. For her, yes. But for him, many girls to bed before he wed. On that he and his father could agree.
Not that his father didn’t like “the rose,” as he’d nicknamed Galina the first time he saw her blush. He worshipped her for nannying Dmitri after Oleg’s little brother took quite a hit to the noggin. Since he was eight, Galina had taken care of him. She was the only steady female presence in Dmitri’s life because Papa married three times during those tumultuous years. But now Dmitri, a hulking fifteen-year-old who towered over Galina like a polar bear, could tie his shoelaces and feed himself and take care of the business at the other end as well, which the doctors said was a miracle of no little magnitude in and of itself. Given “little” brother’s enormous size, Oleg had to agree these were major accomplishments. But miracle? No, not a miracle: Galina Bortnik.
After ordering, paying, and insisting on a mug, not a paper cup — because this was coffee with the former regional director of Greenpeace Russia, mind you, who had to be bribed to walk through the doors of a Starbucks — Oleg sat down and opened his own MacBook. Hers was already bleeding electrons, but hers, she would remind him when necessary, used a solar cell for its juice.
“So when are you going to tell me who?” she asked softly.
He smiled but shook his head, feeling his wavy dark locks brush against his thick eyebrows. He’d split up Professor Ahearn’s files to disguise his identity and give her only what she needed to break the professor’s algorithms and contextual esoteric information and nothing more. So far she had been extraordinarily productive.
It was her hacking, after all, that had led him to Ahearn. To find the latest research on Ambient Air Capture, he’d hired her almost two years ago to scour the web, finding promising leads, pinpointing the most likely servers, and even identifying their network administrators.
He’d known it was out there, and the incalculable potential — and profits — to be had from the technology. Last month she’d closed in on an MIT professor. Oleg took it from there, spearfishing the administrator with a faked LinkedIn request from a beautiful academic researcher. The administrator took the bait and promptly downloaded a payload of malware, including a keylogger. Then the man logged in to the server. Bingo! Oleg exfiltrated the files — zipping and encoding them to avoid attention.